Banking & Finance Bulletin - Autumn 2017

Welcome to the autumn edition of our Banking & Finance bulletin.

By now we expect that most of you will be firmly back at your desks with the long summer holidays a very distant (but hopefully positive!) memory. Autumn is often a very busy time for both lenders and borrowers alike as many of you will be looking to complete important transactions before year-end. We hope those transactions are progressing well towards a successful completion.

In this bulletin we have selected a list of recent articles written by our Banking & Finance specialists which we expect will be of interest to you. These pieces include regular posts and updates to our website and our publications in legal journals. We hope you enjoy reading these articles and would be delighted to hear from you on any points arising from them. Links to these articles and others available on our website can all be found below.

Stevens & Bolton is unusual in having a high quality specialist Banking, Restructuring and Insolvency team located outside London – capable of dealing with high value and complex work at a competitive price. In Banking & Finance we advise lenders and borrowers on transactions ranging from £1 to £100 million plus and cover acquisition finance, real estate finance, trade finance and asset based lending among other things. We want to bring our own style – combining a commercial, problem-solving and flexible approach with high technical standards and project management skills – to everything we work on. Please read Andrew Dodds’ piece for more on our approach and how it may differ from that of other law firms.

And finally you may be interested to know that we also produce a Restructuring & Insolvency bulletin. Click here to read more.

Many asset based lenders charge collection fees as part of making available asset based facilities to companies. What is asset based lending / invoice discounting? Asset based lending (more particularly, invoice discounting) is a financing... Read more

All good things must end sometime and so the same would appear to be true of LIBOR. On 27 July, the Chief Executive of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (“ FCA ”), Andrew Bailey, delivered a speech on the future of LIBOR and announced... Read more

The Court of Appeal has recently determined that a floating charge will be valid even if, at the time when it is created, there are no unencumbered assets for it to attach to. The relevant case can be read in full at the following link: ... Read more

On 27 June the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published Policy Statement 17/13 setting out its final rules to ban contractual clauses that restrict competition without being clearly beneficial to clients. This Policy Statement, including the FCA’s... Read more

Could a lender owe a higher duty of care to its customers rather than one simply not to misstate facts, even where no advisory relationship exists? A recent case, Philip Thomas, Helen Thomas v Triodos Bank NV [2017] EWHC 314 (QB), has highlighted that,... Read more

Contributions to external publications

We are regular contributors to a number of external publications.

Jonathan Porteous and Matthew Padian have recently prepared a checklist on negotiating a Debenture for a corporate borrower for leading legal publisher, Practical Law – click here to read more.

Earlier this year the same authors contributed an article to the Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law which considers the limits on majority creditors’ rights to bind minority creditors in a debt restructuring - click here to readmore.

A final word...

In this short interview, Andrew Dodds, Managing Associate, gives an overview of how we are setting ourselves apart from our competitors. Read this interview to find out more about what we can offer you.